KOCHI/NEW DELHI, Jan 2 (Reuters) – Two women defied a centuries-old ban on entering a Hindu temple in the Indian state of Kerala on Wednesday, sparking protests and calls for a strike by conservative Hindu groups outraged by their visit.

Police fired teargas and used water cannons to disperse a large crowd of protesters in the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, television news channels showed.

There were protests in several other cities in the state, media reported.

India’s Supreme Court in September ordered the lifting of the ban on women or girls of menstruating age from entering the Sabarimala temple, which draws millions of worshippers a year.

Two top Democrats – Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer – have posted identical “orange man bad” Tweets, which has breathed fresh life into the infamous “NPC” (non-player character) meme. Pelosi and Schumer have both been accused of being Trump-hating automatons after the curious stunt.

The two politicians are now, even more so, the laughing stock of the Twitter world. According to a tweet from Mark Dice, they didn’t even bother to put the DNC (Democratic National Committee) talking points in their own words. Is this simply a matter of copy and paste in true NPC form?

They didn't even bother to put the DNC talking points in their own words before tweeting them out. (Not photoshopped) 😆 pic.twitter.com/J00Szak6W8

Cohen says his show nearly helped the F.B.I. expose a pedophile ring in Las Vegas.

via Vanity Fair – Kevin Fitzpatrick. We rely on Sacha Baron Cohen’s undercover schtick to expose the cruelest and most clueless to public ridicule. Showtime’s short-lived Who Is America?continued that tradition with such viral stunts as unmasking a Georgia state representative’s willingness to use racial epithets, but some gags are too extreme for even Cohen. As the Ali G and Borat prankster now reveals, one un-aired sting nearly exposed a Las Vegas pedophile ring, and caught the attention of the F.B.I.

Speaking with Deadline, Cohen revealed his “Gio Moldonado” character filmed an interview with an unspecified Las Vegas hotel concierge that broached the subject of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault cases. Cohen then pivoted toward “extreme comedy,” implying his character had molested a young boy, though the concierge didn’t react as anticipated. “We thought that the guy would leave the room,” recalled Cohen. “Instead, this concierge stays in the room and I go, ‘listen, you’ve got to help me get rid of the problem.’ And this guy starts advising Gio how to get rid of this issue. We even at one point talk about murdering the boy, and the concierge is just saying, ‘well, listen, I’m really sorry. In this country, we can’t just drown the boy. This is America we don’t do that.’”

Cohen went on to explain how the concierge offered to connect him with a lawyer to silence the boy, but that wasn’t the end of it. His character next inquired if the concierge could fetch him a “date” with a boy “lower than Bar Mitzvah but older than eight,” and the concierge reportedly replied “yeah, I can put you in touch with somebody who can get you some boys like that.” The stunt was considered “too dark and wrong” for even This Is America, and Cohen’s team subsequently sent their footage to the F.B.I. to investigate. According to Cohen, the bureau evidently decided not to pursue the matter, though the actor noted “This concierge had said that he’d worked for politicians and various billionaires.”

via Medium – Caitlin Johnstone – Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.

Mike Adams. (Natural News) A bombshell scientific study reveals that aspartame may be one of the most damaging vectors for the widespread “dumbing down” of humanity. Published in AJTCAM (African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines), the study is entitled, “IMPACT OF ASPARTAME CONSUMPTION ON NEUROTRANSMITTERS IN RAT BRAIN.” (Source)

The study fed rats aspartame for durations of 10 – 40 days, then decapitated the rats and analyzed their brains. From the abstract, “Blood and brain tissue were collected for biochemical analysis. Biochemical analysis of brain tissue includes neurotransmitters (Acetylcholine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, ?-aminobutyric acid and serotonin). Serum for determination of lipid peroxidation (MDA), reduced glutathione and superoxide dismutase (SOD).”

Shocking results show aspartame eviscerated brain neurotransmitters

The results of the study found a dose-dependent relationship between aspartame consumption and the destruction of neurotransmitters — brain chemicals necessary for the function of neurons.

Posted on 12/08/2018 by EraOfLight — After weaseling his way through a series of congressional hearings this past spring, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is back in the news following the revelation that his social media empire committed even more crimes with its mishandling of private user data.

A bombshell cache of documents recently handed over to lawmakers in the United Kingdom prove once and for all that Facebook repeatedly disregarded the law to get where it is today – as well as show that every single one of its movers and shakers, including Zuckerberg himself, belongs in prison.

According to the contents of these internal documents, Facebook used a virtual private network (VPN) from Onavo, a company that it later acquired, to spy on the activities of major competitors like Snapchat and WhatsApp, both of which were also targets of acquisition for Facebook. Facebook also selectively targeted the applications of its competitors, disallowing them from fully functioning as designed.

Furthermore, after thoroughly reviewing these same documents, top U.K. lawmakers discovered that secretive “whitelisting agreements” had been established by Facebook with select companies, giving them preferential access “to vast amounts of user data” – information that had previously been sealed by a California court.

In an article titled “The Guardian offered a bombshell story about Paul Manafort. It still hasn’t detonated.”, WaPo writer Pul Farhi draws attention to the fact that it has been a week since the Guardianpublished a claim that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met repeatedly with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, without any evidence backing up the claim, using solely anonymous sources, and despite the claims contradicting known records of Assange’s guests at the Ecuadorian embassy. Criticism and demands for answers have been growing louder and louder from both friends and enemies of WikiLeaks, with new plot holes opening up in the Guardian‘s narrative daily, and the scandal is now moving into mainstream awareness.

And the Guardian remains silent, with its editor-in-chief Katharine Viner refusing to utter so much as a peep of defense this entire time. The only comment the publication has issued has been repeated day after day verbatim to every news outlet which writes about this bizarre occurrence: “This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.” Which is basically just implying that they can print any libelous nonsense they want about anyone if their denials aren’t sent to the proper email address on time.

The Huffington Post has just published yet another brazen hit piece on University of Sheffield professor Piers Robinson. And when I say brazen, I mean reallygoddamn brazen. The entire article consists of nothing but senior HuffPo editor Chris York meticulously documenting the fact that a university professor is “heavily critical of western governments and media” who expresses skepticism of establishment narratives around 9/11, Syria, and Russia, and suggesting that it is bad and wrong for a university to employ anyone with dissenting views.

Even for a hit piece the article feels incredibly forced, ham-fisted and desperate. Reading it gives you the feeling as if York is leaning way into your personal space, pressing his face against your ear, and saying “You are not to believe the things that horrible man says about what is happening in your world. I will tell you what you are to believe about those controversial events. Big Brother is your friend. You love Big Brother.”

Which would be weird enough even without the fact that York has been personally targeting Robinson and other anti-imperialist voices with identical hit pieces overand over and over again this year. A senior HuffPo editor has published hit piece after hit piece after hit piece against a small group of academics and reporters who have very little influence compared to a mass media outlet, but still far too much for a virulent empire sentry like York.

And this is just what’s happening today. For the last two years the mass media machine has been behaving very, very strangely, and it isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. Not since the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq have we seen mainstream media outlets trying to shove narratives down our throats so desperately and aggressively, and even then they were doing it for one very specific purpose.

In 2016, for the first time ever, some things didn’t go as scripted for the propagandists and manipulators who pace the public into going along with plans laid that they never voted for by people they did not elect. Widespread internet access, alternative media, WikiLeaks, and discontent with the status quo converged and danced in such a way with one another in 2016 that a large number of people realized that the talking heads on their TV screens are lying to them all the time. An unacceptably large number of people.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The unelected power establishment which rules over us depends on narrative control in order to rule, and if people do not trust the plutocrat-owned talking heads who are telling them what narratives to believe, there can be no control. In France we’ve been seeing uncontrollable protesters from across the political spectrum writing “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe, which you may be certain has widened plutocratic eyes all around the world.

And that, I believe, is why the mass media have been behaving so strangely. For two years they have been reaching and leaning all over the place trying to regain control of the narrative like a novice ice skater trying to regain balance, and they are only getting closer to falling. Which probably makes the present moment the perfect time to give them a good shove. Spread truth about the mass media’s deceptions like the Guardian‘s psyop against WikiLeaks, wake people up to what they’re trying to accomplish by herding people into partisan echo chambers, arresting Assange, censoring the internet, and marginalizing alternative media which provides dissident narratives.

The only thing keeping the many from rising like lions against the few to create a new world which benefits everyone is the establishment propaganda machine, and right now it is wildly off balance. Shove hard, and don’t stop shoving until it falls.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion of freedom. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” ~Frank Zappa

We fall under the illusion of freedom when we consent to be governed. We believe we live in a fair and democratic society yet we fail to grasp the true meaning of words such as democratic, republic, inalienable, and consent. When we decipher the words, we find that we live in a reality of inequity; a ‘world for the taking’ by a few at the expense of the many. Only when we know who we are— a spiritual being having a human experience— will the system of slavery be changed.

Weaponized Words

The illusion of freedom happens when we consent to the language. We are convinced that paper documents and laws grant us certain inalienable rights, those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet we overlook how unalienable was changed to inalienable in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Unalienable rights are rights which cannot be sold or transferred, whereas inalienable rights can be! Unalienable rights are yours and yours alone. Without them, we are subjects of the government.

Nate Lanxon. Facebook Inc. wielded user data like a bargaining chip, providing access when that sharing might encourage people to spend more time on the social network — and imposing strict limits on partners in cases where it saw a potential competitive threat, emails show.

A trove of internal correspondence, published online Wednesday by U.K. lawmakers, provides a look into the ways Facebook executives, including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, treated information posted by users like a commodity that could be harnessed in service of business goals. Apps were invited to use Facebook’s network to grow, as long as that increased usage of Facebook. Certain competitors, in a list reviewed by Zuckerberg himself, were not allowed to use Facebook’s tools and data without his personal sign-off.

In early 2013, Twitter Inc. launched the Vine video-sharing service, which drew on a Facebook tool that let Vine users connect to their Facebook friends. Alerted to the possible competitive threat by an engineer who recommended cutting off Vine’s access to Facebook data, Zuckerberg replied succinctly: “Yup, go for it.”

They are transforming the Internet into the greatest tool of surveillance that humanity has ever seen, and if we stay on the road that we are currently on it is only a matter of time until our society becomes a hellish dystopian nightmare. I wish that this was an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Over the past couple of decades, the Internet has completely changed the way that we all communicate with one another. At one time, all forms of mass communication were tightly controlled by the elite, but the Internet suddenly allowed us to communicate with one another on a massive scale without having to go through their gatekeepers. This radically altered the landscape, and at first the elite were unsure of how to respond to this growing threat. There was no way that they could roll back time to an era before the Internet was invented, and so they have decided to use it for their own insidious purposes instead.

Today, the Internet has become the centerpiece of their “Big Brother surveillance grid”, and they are gathering information on all of us on a scale that has never been seen before in all of human history. But of course it was never going to stop there. Over the past couple of years we have started to watch the elite use all of this information to punish those that are doing or saying things that they do not like.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon is what is going on in China. The following comes from BuzzFeed…

November 17, 2018 – A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton to answer five questions the

former Secretary of State has avoided for years about her use of a private email server to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.

On Wednesday U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan gave Clinton 30 days to respond under oath to five questions.

Sullivan announced his decision from the bench rather than waiting to issue it in writing, an indication of the urgency he appears to attach to the case.

These questions were all put to her nearly four years ago in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit government watchdog Judicial Watch.

Hillary Clinton Email Questions

The five questions Hillary Clinton must answer are:

1.) Who decided to create the clintonemail.com system?

2.) When was it created?

3.) Why was it created?

4.) Who set it up?

5.) When did it become operational?

Clinton has on many occasions refused to answer those five and many more questions about why she used a secret email server, instead of the legally required government system during her tenure as the chief U.S. diplomat.

We’re robotizing the supermarket – which has never been done before. This is the first of many deployments we are working on, and shoppers will soon see more local grocery stores with micro- fulfillment centers.

BOSTON (PRWEB) Takeoff Technologies, an eGrocery solution that empowers retailers to attain profitable online growth by leveraging automation at a hyperlocal scale, today announced the launch of the first automated hyperlocal fulfillment center, referred to as the world’s first robotic supermarket in partnership with one of the largest Hispanic grocers in the U.S., Sedano’s Supermarkets.

This groundbreaking technology is expected to launch in the upcoming month, bringing innovative automation and transforming eGrocery economics. Customer orders will be placed via an online app and carried out by Takeoff’s automated Micro-Fulfillment Center, with the support of Sedano’s employees. AI-enabled robots assemble full supermarket orders of up to 60 items in just a few minutes – a fraction of the speed and cost of current manual picking options.

Italian Army and police stand in front of Holy See Embassy to Italy Credit: STEFANO RELLANDINI(Agence France-Presse) The family of a teenager who went missing in Italy in 1983 has called on the Vatican to provide more details on the discovery of human remains in one of its properties.

The bones were uncovered on Monday by builders refurbishing a building owned by the Vatican in Rome, the Holy See said, in a potential breakthrough for police investigating one of Italy’s darkest mysteries.

Since the grisly find, Italian media have been rife with speculation that they could shed light on the fate of one or possibly two teenagers who went missing in the 1980s.